The ever-cranky courts of law keep getting in the
way of this Easter season's record-setting Festival
of Death in Arkansas.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson set up a spectacular
schedule of eight executions in six days and the courts,
both federal and state, have nibbled at it and now it's still
mean, sordid and not for the squeamish, but not as spectacular
as it was meant to be.

The Arkansas Supreme Court stayed the execution of
the first two men sentenced to die late Monday, and the
state's attorney general vowed to appeal, but it's not clear
where and how the two men would get back in the rotation.

The symmetry of the festival, though hardly a work
of art, could be spoiled.

The
Arkansas
executions
have brought
unwanted
attention
to the state,
and to the governor, who has been busy with symbolism
over the past month. He first stripped Robert E. Lee of
the honor of a state holiday, perhaps in salute to yankee
entrepreneurs and overseas investors who might not want
to spend money in a place that still reveres its heroes of
the War of Northern Aggression. Now Arkansas is at last
eligible to pursue without hindrance a new shirt or shoe
factory. History, as Henry Ford said, is bunk, anyway.

Gov. Hutchinson said he had to schedule his remarkable
round-robin because the state was about to run out of
the chemicals - "pharmaceutical drugs," for the squeamish
- needed to put the criminals to a terminal sleep
and, besides, some of the chemicals on hand were close
to their sell-by date. The three-drug cocktail doesn't
always work as promised, anyway. Recent botched executions
in Ohio and Oklahoma subjected prisoners to
long and agonizing deaths, with considerable gasping,
wheezing and thrashing about. One required an hour to
die.

Arkansas has held memorable executions in the past.
One of the most infamous was that of the feeble-minded
Ricky Ray Rector. After a sumptuous last supper, provided
by custom, Rector so enjoyed the pecan pie that
he insisted on leaving a piece of it in his cell to eat after
his execution. Gov. Bill Clinton, in deference to public
opinion, interrupted his first campaign for president to
hurry home to Arkansas to preside over the execution.

But capital punishment is not as popular as it once
was, when crowds gathered outside prison gates for tailgate
parties with live music, cold beer and chants of "fry
him." The electric chair has given way to the needle,
and absent the sizzle the drama is not nearly as exciting.
Twenty-five years ago the Pew Poll of public opinion
showed that 71 percent of Democrats approved of the
state taking
the lives of the
guilty, and that
number has
fallen to the
low 40s.

Larger
numbers of
Republicans
have always
supported
capital punishment,
a mark
of its devotion
to law and
order, but the
same Pew polling
finds that
support among
Republicans
has dropped
from 87
percent to 77
percent.

A small but expanding group of prominent conservatives
argue that authentic conservatism leads away
from capital punishment. Some of the names, ranging
from Jeb Bush to Newt Gingrich to Rick Perry, are
surprising. The death penalty is as popular as ever with
many conservatives, naturally, but methods of dealing
death are not. Inefficiency inevitably costs money, and
wasteful government inefficiency is not a conservative
virtue.

Nebraska, for example, has spent $100 million on
death-penalty cases since the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed
the constitutionality of the death penalty in 1976,
and has executed only three men. This hardly argues
that money spent executing criminals is cost-efficient.

Curiously, it's often Republican governors who have restrained
the executioner. The late Winthrop Rockefeller,
the governor of Arkansas, commuted the sentences of 15
prisoners when he left office.
But no other governor has acted with the boldness
of George Ryan in Illinois, who in one swoop spared
163 lives in 2003, even as he was fighting accusations of
the personal misdeeds that seem to be in the DNA of
Illinois governors.

"The facts that I have seen in reviewing each and
every one of these cases raised questions not only
about the innocence of people on death row," he said,
"but about the fairness of the death penalty system as a
whole. Our capital system is haunted by the demon of
error: error in determining guilt and determining who
among the guilty deserves to die."

The Arkansas festival of death is unusual only that it is
death by wholesale. Innocent men have died on the gallows,
in the electric chair and by riding the poison needles
in many places. The responsibility is shared by all of us.